Archive for November 2009

The shocking thing about those incidents where some disaffected kid tries to blow up his high school isn’t the fact that such things can happen in these United States of America: it’s that it happens so rarely. When I think about how our our educational system has damaged our culture, I feel rather like gathering up some dynamite myself. Fortunately (for any Feds or other concerned people who might come across this website) I am a law-abiding citizen, and moreover, my own stint in Warehouse High wasn’t all that onerous. (After one more year of enduring stupid PE, I was able to mostly choose my own classes — which I stacked with useless foreign language and college-level English courses, which means I can watch a subtitled German movie about Goethe without too much eyestrain — and was able to shut out anything I didn’t care about by burying my face in science fiction paperbacks.)

Everywhere you go, everything you encounter, every attitude and platitude and political position, has its roots in the jocks-vs.-nerds, popular-vs.-unwanted, James-Spader-Molly-Ringwald-couples-don’t-exist-in-real-life dichotomy the nation’s citizenry experienced in high school. We are currently experiencing a revenge-of-the-nerds administration — with the sting in the tail being that Obama really isn’t a nerd, he’s just one of those people who would have been a jock but for having no athletic ability. There’s nothing worse than someone who can’t be what he is. We must all pay for his personality dysfunctions.

But enough of him. Let’s talk about Sarah Palin! Okay — I’ll just wait until some of you calm down and stop flapping about your cages like that. My my, look at all those loose feathers… Anyway, Sarah Palin is, obviously, a jock, and so all of us who fancy ourselves intellectuals whether artistic or scientific or both must be up in arms against her commonplace, shallow, brawn-not-brain, “get your nose out of that book and clean up your room!”, boys-who-won’t-play-football-are-fags, scratchy “nice” dress for church no you can’t sleep late, God wants you to stay a virgin! self. Or… do we?

It’s disappointing to see people fall into the “ew she’s icky because ordinary people like her they must be stoopid it can’t be because they are thinking for themselves” tarpit. Or as I put it in the comments here:

According to Answers.com, “populism” is:

A political philosophy supporting the rights and power of the people in their struggle against the privileged elite.

Can someone tell me what exactly is wrong with this political philosophy, so much so that labeling Sarah Palin and her admirers with it is supposed to be an insult? Then again, if you’re one of the crowd who likes being led around by the nose by a slick, smooth-talking con-man and his crowd of grifters, because his skin color is “in” this year, and because he’s gone to all the “right” schools and knows all the cool people, then I can see why the idea of ordinary people trying to buck the trendy and powerful distresses you so. Or is it just that she doesn’t seem to have had a problem with pregnancy weight gain?

I admit I like Sarah Palin. She’s not at all like me. I’m bookish and introverted and in general the sort of person you’d expect to find in a coffee shop huddled in a corner with an extra large mocha latte reading her email on her iMac. But I have never been able to afford Apple’s products, and I am glad to say the process of removing my high-school prejudices against the “mundanes” was successful many years ago. I laughed in glee at the consternation Palin causes among the crowd of my once-fellow trendars. I don’t care if she ever runs for office: seeing the roaches scurry frantically across the floor whenever her light shines on them is good enough.

I forgot to add, it’s the faux definition of populism that Daphne uses that got Obama elected. George Bush, an authentic jock, was hated by the intellectuals, who voted in the shiny Official Black Man™ who made them feel speshul. When you asked any white person* why they were voting for Obama you got “we need a Change,” and when you asked them what the hell they meant by that, more often than not you got a long, rambling, anti-Bush rant that only tangentially had anything to do with the question. (If you based your vote on “he’s not Bush,” you’re even stupider, because Bush wasn’t running, and couldn’t run due to the fact he’d had his two terms.) As a matter of fact, Obama is an unabashed elitist and that fact turns on a lot of his fans, but he ran on a populist “me against the Big Bad Bush regime” ticket, and that was enough for our kneejerk grown-up high school student voters, who have never gotten over being stuffed into their lockers by the football team.

*Black people are much more honest about why they voted for Obama. It’s because he’s black, duh.

I have finally read Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, so now I know what happened and I don’t have to avoid websites and internet discussions in fear of two-year-old spoilers. Which effort hadn’t been very successful anyway, though there was a bit of suspense when a part I had read about turned out to be in the beginning of the book, thus calling into question whether a certain main character survived after all…

I’m sure there are a couple of people in the highlands of New Guinea who haven’t read it yet, so I’ll avoid spoilers just to be kind. My review doesn’t really need them, as I have no quarrel with the resolution of the plot itself so see no need to go into detail. I was rather underwhelmed by the book as a whole. It read rather second-, or even first-drafty, as if the author rushed to get it out and then didn’t feel like wrestling it into better shape. I can’t blame Rowling for being tired of the series, what with all the hysteria and hype that has surrounded it for so long, and will continue to do so until the last movie of the last book is done. Still, she should have done some tweaking. Basically, the story’s rhythm is uneven — we spend far too much time with the three main characters (Harry, Ron, and Hermione, for our new visitors from Epsilon Eridani VI who have just been introduced to the series) doing nothing but hiding out and arguing, and then picking up their tent and stowing it in Hermione’s handy Tardis-bag (it’s bigger on the inside), and moving to another place; and not enough time with other perhaps less major characters who are, however, doing things. Which things we are mostly told about after the fact too many times. “Show not tell,” anyone? For the most part, the action scenes are too compressed and rushed, and the scenes of relatively peaceful interludes (such as Bill and Fleur’s wedding) go on too long. The writing is also not up to even Rowling’s simple par, and I actually had trouble getting into the book because the style was so perfunctory and lifeless.

Other problems: some major secondary characters are dispatched rather abruptly and barely mentioned again if at all. Others are brought up in the first part of the book, then moved out of the action for most of the middle only to be dragged back in for the climax. I am referring specifically to Snape and to Remus Lupin and Tonks. Snape is a major villain, he gets made headmaster when Voldemort’s crew takes over… and then we hardly hear anything about him until towards the ending when we get the revelation about him. Lupin gets an emotional scene with Harry near the beginning… then vanishes until he turns up, again, near the end. Tonks doesn’t get to do anything much at all, but instead disappears into having-Remus’-baby land, which is okay, except it makes her re-appearance at the ending showdown rather forced. (I can’t help thinking that no normal mother would abandon her baby even to fight an evil Dark Lord.) And we never find out what happens to Luna Lovegood’s father — this bugged me.

Many individual scenes were good, especially the action sequences (the meeting with Dumbledore’s cynical brother, the creepy sequence in Godric’s Hollow involving Harry’s parents’ grave and Bathilda Bagshot, Mrs. Weasley’s moment of awesome, Neville Longbottom’s continuing awesome — which alas, only appears in the climax — the last meeting of Snape and Harry, and so on) though like I said they were rushed and compressed; I am quite looking forward to how they will be done in the movie. I still like the way Harry isn’t made into some Wonder Child with Speshul Insight, but is instead more or less an ordinary teenager with personality flaws who yet does grow and improve. The relationship between Ron and Hermione is quite believable, and has been throughout the series. I’m afraid, though, that I can’t quite believe in the Harry-Ginny pairing, maybe because we never really get to know Ginny — we don’t see her doing much of anything except being sent into safety and looking at Harry yearningly. I don’t know why Rowling felt she even had to give Harry a girlfriend; he was certainly much too busy with other matters. Just because Ron and Hermione got together didn’t mean he had to make a similar life-bond at such a young age.

I wish also that more emphasis had been given to Voldemort’s actions. He was on his own evil quest all over the place, but merely seeing his actions through Harry’s eyes (or rather, scar) got tiresome after a while. It may have been less tiresome if Harry could have somehow broken out of the small corner of England he was in and gone on a chase of Voldemort across Europe, or something. Couldn’t he have borrowed a dragon? At least he’d have gotten out of that tent.

On the whole, though, it was a decent enough wrap-up. More characters than I thought survived. From what I’d read on the internet just about everyone got dispatched, but this didn’t turn out to be quite true. And that’s all I can think of to say about Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

That’s the play I saw tonight, acted at the American Shakespeare Center. It was hilarious. A review is coming up (along with reviews of all the other plays I’ve seen in town) when I get around to it. Here’s a taste: metafiction was not invented in the 20th century.

Here’s the text (which I’ve decided to put in the extended entry because that Google Books iframe does make the page load slow down):
Read more »

I‘ve lost thirty pounds since I moved up here. That’s 30. I’m down from a whale-like 195 to a cow-like 165. My goal by new year’s is twenty more. It’s almost December so I don’t know if I can do that in a month. Still. THIRTY pounds. I almost look human now. (Also, soon I’m going to need new pants. My two pairs of jeans are already way too big and as I threw out all my belts I have to use a scarf to keep them from falling down.)

My life is like this sometimes: The Jean-Paul Sartre Cookbook. Maybe I should try a little paprika…

I won’t call it “Turkey Day” because I’m not in kindergarten, and I’m not having turkey. My friend’s off in Maryland visiting family, so I’m actually going to cook a cornish game hen (which I found out to my evil joy is actually a teenage chicken; I suppose they call it something else to stave off kiddie “ew!” reactions), and will be having brussel sprouts and potatoes on the side, along with a cheap merlot (not a local brand this time, just on sale). Perhaps I will post a picture of the feast later. Oh — and the forecast calls for “possible snow showers” tonight or tomorrow night, though right now it’s in the mid-fifties. But it is clouding up in a most promising manner!

Update, next day: no pix, I really should stop saying I’m going to post pictures of something — it almost guarantees I won’t. As for the weather, it’s in the mid-40s, but earlier there was a sprinkle of what seemed to be tiny ice crystals, like baby hail, which melted on contact. I’m going to call it “sleet” so I can say I’ve experienced my first sleet. So there.

Oh, Internet Archive Wayback Machine, I do heart you so. I don’t know if any of you, my readers, have noticed my little “Asides” posts over on the side menu, but I’ve mentioned in the last two that I had found some of my old (and as I thought, gone forever) blog from 2002 on that website and have been copying what I could find, preliminary to uploading it again on my own server somewhere. Well, guess what I also found — a short story I’d written for a creative writing class I took the last year I was at university. It turned out rather well, I thought, but somehow I had managed to lose all my filed copies and printouts, don’t ask me how. I knew I had uploaded it on a couple of my old websites, but those urls were defunct as well. But I finally found a copy on said archiving site. I’ve uploaded it here, so if you’re curious go read. It’s not science fiction or fantasy, but a straight “literary fiction” story since that’s what we were supposed to write, but as I said, I thought it turned out rather well anyway.

I’m so glad I found the damned thing, its loss had been driving me insane for nearly four years.

In an update to the finding of some of my old posts (from my 2002 blog that vanished in a database crash) on the Internet Wayback Machine, I have now found that they seem to have stored my individual posts, including the comments. That’s much better. Of course, what isn’t better is I’m having to save a year’s (or however much they have — I hope it’s the whole year’s) blog posts one by one. I will also need to get them back up on my server somehow — I don’t want to keep them on the laptop, it’s not safe to just have them in one place. Well, the Internet Wayback Machine is two places, but who knows when they’ll decide to clear out their databases of seven-year-old junk?

At the first reading of this article I would have answered “children,” because when I was five years old I am pretty sure I had learned by that time that my favorite cartoon characters did not in fact live in my tv set. I don’t remember exactly when I learned it, but I do know that early on I had come to understand that tv shows were broadcast through the air, where they were received by our outdoor antenna and thus passed on into the television. (I imagined this literally like a sort of invisible lightning hitting the antenna and then flowing through the antenna cables into the television — these “cables” by the way weren’t the coaxial ones we have come to know and love, but flat cables with two thick wires encased in plastic that came out at the end attached to two little prongs, which were attached to the proper place on tv sets by screws — anyway, I imagined the television broadcast waves as being zapped into the antennas where they would flow down the cables, into the house, and into the tv set. This mental image was no doubt enhanced by the cartoon images of that very scene that were common at the time.) My point is, since I understood (in a rudimentary, simple way) how tv shows got to my family’s television (in those days most people had just one tv set), I also understood that there would be times when I would not have access to my favorite shows — times like power outages, or when we went up to visit my grandparents in their summer home in the mountains where tv reception wasn’t very good in those pre-cable days. In other words, I would sometimes be in the position of the article writer’s daughter — in a place where I would not have my usual access to my electronic entertainment. So what is the difference?

The difference is the daughter in question seemed to have never been told that there would be times and places where she couldn’t get her electronic fix; if we are to believe this man, she had no understanding of something most people in the world accepted as normal (and still do — only a very small elite group of wealthy humans can afford to be this ignorant of the limits of their own tech). But what is even more interesting is that the article writer simply despaired of explaining the situation to her. He actually writes that “[t]here was no way that I was going to convince her that Webkinz was not available and that it was not housed in my computer.” He goes on to say that she had no idea what the internet was. Then he goes off into a tangent about how his daughter’s generation “expected” to always be connected and have internet whenever they want it, etc.

Why did he think that he couldn’t explain the internet to her?

Let’s review: the daughter was five years old; not ready for deep scientific explanations of anything, but certainly smart enough to understand a simple explanation for why and how a device like a computer worked. The author doesn’t say how old he is but since he has three children he’s old enough, perhaps, to remember a time when computers weren’t in every home, though he might not remember the days of only a few broadcast tv channels. Still, he could have easily sat his daughter down and explained the internet using something like my television analogy in terms that his daughter could understand. I can easily think of a way to describe the internet versus the home computer setup, and since many people these days combine their cable tv and internet the tv reception analogy is even more apt. He wouldn’t have to get into intricate details. But instead, he seems to have just given up. I wonder how the rest of his vacation went.

What is worrisome is this guy is some sort of educator, as per his about page. He says on that page “all kids can learn,” but he didn’t even think he could teach his daughter a simple lesson about the internet. The statements about today’s children expecting connectivity when and where they want it, as if this were a normal attitude for children and not evidence that we are producing a new crop of entitlement junkies, are just as worrisome. What about teaching kids — they can learn after all — that this high-tech paradise of complete interconnectivity and having anything you want basically at your fingertips is a unique situation in human history, a fluke even, and that 1) not everyone on earth has access to this paradise, and 2) it might not last even for us? Also, complacent attitudes like the one on display in the article (we’ll always have our neat gadgets, the thing we need to concentrate on his making sure our kids are always being entertained or “stimulated” in a way competitive with the gadgets) are a creativity killer, because if all you have to do is push a few buttons to get something you want why bother with doing something that takes concentration, physical work, and the ability to think outside of the computer?

(Via The Fourth Checkraise.)

I was searching around the Internet Wayback Machine and found some of my old posts from my 2002 blog, Spleenville World Domination Headquarters, which I had lost in a database crash. They’re nothing special, but they’re mine, so I’m going to be putting them up one of these days as soon as I clean up the urls and code as best I can. (Note: the comments to the posts were not saved — basically these are old cached copies of the main blog site.)

As a treat, here’s an old friend:

Choppin' Dude

I’ll post an announcement when the site is updated.